Bridge Of Childhood Nightmares

Day 188: You know how it starts: "Back when I was a kid..." Well, back when I was a kid, this bridge scared the livin' daylights out of me every time we crossed it. My uncle Gus was a ranger in this corner of the Park in those days, and occasionally, he'd take us on a day excursion to Ipsut. It felt to me as if we were driving through time to an era when miners worked long hours with pick and shovel in the coal mines of the area, when they went to work on horseback and returned home to meals cooked on enormous wood-fired cast-iron stoves. I half-expected to see them, such were my childhood illusions, and that Gus was a part of protecting one corner of nature from their imagined predations upon the land and its animals elevated him to a position worthy of reverence in my young eyes. The fantasy was compounded a hundredfold when we reached the dreaded bridge over Carbon River Canyon, for in those days it did not have a surface of asphalt, and the gaps between the crosswise timbers seemed large enough for Gus' Plymouth to fall between, were it to slip off the lengthwise boards which served as tire tracks. Gus delighted in winding my mother up about crossing the bridge; by the time we reached it, she was thoroughly petrified, and her anxiety transferred to me in the back seat. And then, just to be wicked, he would drive ever so slowly across, explaining that he didn't want to put undue stress on the structure. I don't recall that I was ever fully in tears by the time we again had our wheels on the dirt road, but I do remember that the bridge appeared in my dreams on more than one occasion in a nightmare of the car falling, falling, falling toward the river 250 feet below. Brave Gus travelled across that bridge repeatedly during his years as a backcountry ranger. How could I not worship him? How could I not wish to follow in his footsteps? But by the time I was old enough to continue his mission at Carbon River, the bridge and the dirt road had both been paved, and the ghosts of the miners had retreated to their tunnels in Melmont, Fairfax, Burnett (lower and upper), Wilkeson, Carbonado. And for me, the bridge is now an old friend.

Of Ghosts And Graffiti

Day 187: With both of us fully vaccinated, I accepted Kevin's proposal to go for a hike to the ghost town of Melmont yesterday, my first real social contact in over a year, discounting brief out-in-the-yard visits with friends on half a dozen occasions. The Washington Trails Association website described the hike as being a six-mile round trip, but gave three different starting points which, as we drove by them, we discovered were up to a mile and a half from WTA's recommended starting point. That should have given us a clue to the reliability of the description, but we assumed (as would any other reasonable person) that the length of the hike would be measured from the primary trailhead to the destination. Therefore, we were a little surprised when we came to the first evidence of human occupation (above) less than half a mile from the car. A little further on, we came to a four-walled and heavily graffiti-ed structure roughly 15' on a side, the old dynamite storage facility beyond which we expected to find a "mud pit" and a Y junction in the trail per the WTA instructions. The mud pit never materialized, and the left arm of the Y took us to a similiar stone construction which, after some consideration, we determined to be the schoolhouse basement. It too was graffiti-ed within an inch of its life, and I could find no angle for a photo from which I could block out the scrawls with trees and ferns. Here, the question arose as to whether we had found Melmont or not. The WTA description implied that the schoolhouse was set apart from the rest of the town, but it was the only other remnant of a building we were able to locate. We were only a little over a mile in. Maybe we should keep going? So we did.

At a point just short of three miles from the car, the wide dirt rail-trail abruptly devolved into the customary boot-track of a true trail. At 3.5 miles in, we said to each other over lunch, "That must have been Melmont," and decided to turn around. Back at the Y, we dropped down onto the flat which we assumed held the townsite, found the footings of the old bridge and some scattered red bricks among the ATV-carved ruts, concluding, "Yep, we've seen Melmont, all right."

While the hike was enjoyable, it was not what we had been led to expect from the WTA description. For one thing, the total trail length had apparently been measured from the most distant possible starting point to the site, and what ruins there were had apparently become so overgrown with vegetation since the web page had been written that they had entirely "ghosted" from view. The abundance of graffiti detracted from any sense of history I might have felt in viewing the old structures and on the return, there were way too many people on the trail for me to be comfortable since most of them didn't bother to mask up as we passed. But that said, in the early hours when we had the trail to ourselves, we heard the call of the thrush, the piping of frogs, the rush of Carbon River, and we had the companionship of one another, friends on the proverbial "busman's holiday" in a different corner of the forests we both love.